Will Turkey get the Marble Head of a Child

Tolga Tuyluoglu said the other day "The Turkish ministry of culture thinks this item belongs to Turkey. We believe if an item has been removed from a country then it should be returned to the original place." Tolga is the director of Turkey's Culture and tourism office in London England. He is talking about a marble head that should be on the top of the Sidamara Sarcophagus that is in Istanbul's Museum of Archeology.
In 1882, the archaeologist Sir Charles Wilson, then Britain's consul-general in Anatolia, removed the head from the Sidamara Sarcophagus, a huge tomb dating from the third century, which he had excavated.
The marble head is that of a child with curly hair looking over his shoulder. Sir Charles's family later donated the head to the Victoria and Albert Museum.


Should Turkey's demand for the return of the missing stone head develop into the kind of row that still surrounds the Elgin marbles, it could have broad ramifications. As Turkey seeks EU membership, co-operation in the fields of art and history is seen as a key element of diplomacy, leading the British artist Mark Wallinger to be commissioned last year to create a temporary cinema for the Turkish city of Canakkale as a symbol of goodwill. "Discussions about Turkey's joining the EU are intense and can be fraught, but without a cultural dimension they lack depth," the British Council's David Codling said at the time. "The arts, in this instance, provide a forum for debate within and between countries."


Note: General Sir Charles Warren, GCMG, KCB, FRS (7 February 1840–21 January 1927) was an officer in the British Royal Engineers. He was one of the earliest European archaeologists of Biblical Holy Land, and particularly of Temple Mount. Much of his military service was spent in the British South Africa, but in later life he was Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis, the head of the London Metropolitan Police, from 1886 to 1888, during the period of the Jack the Ripper murders. His command in combat during the Second Boer War was criticised, but he achieved considerable success during his long life in his military and civil posts.
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